Since others seem to be putting trackback stuff here, I will, too. I am now in the midst of a third round (over a period of many months) of massive trackback spamming (that got past your filter) from someone who identifies themself as "IeriWinner", always with an underscore and a number following the nic - I see numbers as low as 1, as high as 99. Their comment is, inevitably,

>HI! I've have similar topic at my blog! Please check it.. Thanks.

If they were real trackbacks, I'd be delighted, but of course they're not; hardly anybody else tackles "forty-'leven" different serious (and a few frivolous) topics. These days they're using google as their URL. Apparently think it's cute, or something. Yesterday, there were 16. Today, there were 57, by actual count (just noticed there's no "next" option for trackback display; I had to delete the first 50 in ordeer to get to the rest and give an accurate count). Any suggestions (other than deleting, of course)?

Spam prevention is unfortunately more reactive than proactive. Yes, spammers will continually find new ways to get their spam through and we're all seeing the latest evidence of that...

We are indeed aware of this latest wave and will react accordingly, working on methods to identify these trackbacks as spams at an earlier stage. In the meantime, we suggest you Delete and Block these spams; there's nothing that can be done on your side to cause these trackbacks to be detected as spam earlier in the process.

John
I have received 6 e mails advising me about track backs received. When I go into the blog I cannot see a comment, but there is a link templarsMps and when I clicked on it this message appeared. What is it about?
Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@templars.freemp3bank.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.0.58 (FreeBSD) Server at templars.freemp3bank.org Port 80_________________Greater than the tread of might armies is an idea whose time has come
Victor Hugo

Here's a hint: the word "free" in a trackback URL is highly indicative of a spam site, same goes true for the phrase "mp3"; so when you see "free" and "mp3" in the same URL you can probably bet the house that you're looking at a spammer's URL.

In the future you should probably refrain from posting spammer's URLs here; more exposure for their spam is just what they are after, no need to give it to them...

In any case: You received a trackback from a spammer advertising a certain URL. When you clicked on the spammer's URL, their web server generated an error. Why? I honestly don't and wouldn't know why some spammer's website is not functioning properly, but by way of explanation maybe their web host found out they were spamming and pulled the plug. Maybe they had a bug in their software. Regardless of the reason, you should not be concerned about the fact that some spammer's website is returning an error.

Honestly, chances are pretty slim that you will ever get a legitimate trackback. Most of us don't have other bloggers posting content to their own blogs in response to content we post to our blogs and sending trackbacks to let us know they are responding to our posts.

I've been blogging since July 2005 (here since Jan 2006, after the first host went belly-up), and I've yet to get a legitimate trackback, even though I post on a broad variety of topics. I've had two cases (that I know about, and probably that's all) where someone somewhere else posted a link to my blog. One was in another blog, and they linked to a particular series of essays. Another posted a link to the blog, period, because I wrote a number of posts about two of that message board's main topics. Oh, yes, and there's a link posted on a friend's personal web page. Because of his profession, his site gets visited by professional contacts of his.

I know when somebody comes to my blog through one of those sites because it shows up in the "Referer Summary". It was a long time before I realized the value of that report.

There are ways you can promote your blog legitimately. When I first started, I joined BloggerForum.com. There are a lot of helpful people there. I haven't visited the site in a very long time. Why? Because BlogHarbor provides great support (my first host provided none, N-O-N-E). You could also look into Search Engine Optimization. I would caution you to be careful not to do any of the things that can get you in trouble with the search engines.

Speaking as a person who reads blogs (when I can find time), I think the most important ingredient to a successful blog is content. You have to write about some thing(s) that will interest other people. The second most important ingredient (and possibly the most difficult) is patience. It takes a while to be noticed, unless you're already famous, or have some particular professional standing (in other words, already almost famous).

I'm lucky in that the friend mentioned above graciously put a link in his site. We've been friends for a number of years, and I knew that at least some of my content would be of interest to some of his contacts.

I was even luckier that another friend, who has a large number of friends with whom she emails very regularly, sent out emails to all those friends quite often in the beginning when I would post something she found interesting, linking to the posts she was promoting.

Given that's all the popularizing I've done (I could never figure out blogrolling, which supposedly is another great source of traffic; I've got a list of "favorites", but the benefit, if any, is all one-sided - theirs), I think I'm doing quite well, because I began having regular monthly traffic in the one gigabyte of transfer usage about six months ago. And I don't do badly at all in the search engines (don't ask me how; I haven't a clue). That, of course, doesn't count people who use RSS (the bad thing about RSS, from the blogger's perspective, is that you have no way to count how many people are reading your posts that way).

I do sometimes talk about "high profile" topics, but most of the time I talk about stuff like politics, foreign policy, religion, medical stuff, education, etc.. And no pictures, photos or cartoons. In other words, nerdy kinds of stuff, and I'm neither conservative nor liberal, which makes me less attractive to most people who are interested in the kinds of subjects that mostly interest me.

There's still a huge amount I don't know. I've been wanting to change and fix up my blog's format for nearly a year now, and just can't seem to get around to it. I did invest in some books on HTML and formatting last summer - and read them, too, but still can't find that "round tuit".

You're entirely welcome. Now if somebody who has a large audience would speak up, maybe I could learn more, too. I know there are some people here with much larger readership. I'd bet they could give both of us some useful ideas.

I did get some help some months back. I was advised to use longer excerpts of my posts. That was exactly opposite to what I thought was best, but I gave it a try. I had had a big surge in readership in late spring/early summer last year, but then it died down. That bugged me because I wasn't doing anything differently.

Anyway, on that advice, I began putting an entire paragraph in the excerpt, and it seemed to have an effect. my "hosts served" numbers began to climb back up. Of course, "correlation is not causation", so I can't be sure that really helped. I don't think it would help to change back, because you can't do a scientific study on a field of one. Actually, I think it would take a study that included a large number of blogs (hundreds, probably).

I'll tell you something that does have a scientific basis: I believe that being on a host site helps steer readers to your blog, whatever you blog about. Why? Because some people will come across your blog listed in the host's (BlogHarbor, in this case) list of blogs with new postings. I see it in the Referer Summary, so I know I get some visitors that way. Putting a blog out on a site all alone (with only the blogname) is fine for people who already have a bunch of readers, or are famous. Those people don't need any help getting readers, or at least not as much. The rest of us benefit from a blog site, no matter whose it is (of course, I think Blog Harbor is best, for two reasons: Blogware and John - not necessarily in that order ).

Why am I so sure of that? Because it works the same way for stores in a mall. People are drawn to the site, and businesses there get walk-in customers who absolutely hadn't planned to visit their store. People who studied that phenomenon used it to formulate a way to promote the success of new businesses. People just starting a business get an office in a building or group of them, all close together. It gives them more visibility and more floor traffic, and helps them get established.